Which SD-WAN element can be a physical appliance?
| A physical appliance can be used as the WAN edge device in SD-WAN deployments. These are often chosen for performance, redundancy, hardware security, and simplified management, though cloud solutions are increasingly preferred. |
SD WAN elements can be deployed in a physical WAN edge, virtualised server instance, or software application. The main reasons for deploying SD WAN using a physical appliance are as follows:
- Physical dedicated hardware appliances offer better throughput and processing performance compared to virtual servers or software applications.
- Hardware devices are configurable with dual power supplies and redundancy, which in turn offer improved uptime.
- Edge devices are sometimes designed with hardware security that is not possible to replicate within a virtual or software environment.
- Management of a central hardware device can often be simpler because all users are forced through a gateway.
- There may be a need to separate out physical interfaces.
However, public cloud technology, which is accessed by users' laptops, phones, or tablets, is now preferred over physical devices, unless there is a specific use case as outlined in this knowledge article.